The first unit of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant at Kudankulam, 600 km south of Chennai became fully operational by achieving its power level of 1,000 MW on Saturday. The reactor which has been in the making since 31 March 2002, started generating 1,000 MW power at 1.20 pm on Saturday, according to RS Sundar, Project Director, KNPP. The reactor which was built in collaboration with Russian Federation (formerly Union of Soviet Socialist Republic) is the first Pressurised light water Reactor in the country.
The commercial production of power from the KNPP would take another two months, according to Sundar. “We started generating 1,000 MW power continuously and that is the greatest news. This is a reply to those who criticised the Nuclear Power Corporation ltd (NPCIl) terming the reactor as junk and scrap. Now it is for the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) to decide when to start producing commercial power and yield the same to the national grid,” Sundar told The Pioneer over telephone from the master control room of the reactor at Kudankulam.
The agreement for the 1,000 MW reactor was signed on 20 November 1988 by then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the then President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev. Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the project was in limbo for some time. The construction works began on 31 March 2002. Though the reactor was to be readied by December 2007, it got delayed by seven years due to various reasons. One of the reasons given by the NPCIl and the Atomic Energy Commission, the apex body controlling the nuclear power establishments in the country, was that since this was the biggest ever reactor to be built in the history of India’s nuclear energy programme, scientists and engineers were cautious about the safety of the reactor.